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Passerini Tanager male

Attached Images

This is the male of the species. I posted an image of the female a couple of weeks ago.
I hope this thread will start a discussion on taming reds and best practices for shooting birds with black and red.The reds IRL are extremely brilliant and I feel they are accurately represented here although I did desaturate them slightly in PP.
Bird was in shade.
I cloned in some uneven areas in the BG.
Canon 1DX
600mm 1.4 x SS 1/125 f 5.6 ISO 1000
cropped from horizontal
Comments and critiques always appreciated and learned from with thanks,
Gail

Hi Gail, beautiful bird. I think the shade was your savior, in bright light it would have been nearly impossible. A black and red bird is much like a black and white bird. The brightest tone/color controls the exposure. I use the blinkies for black and white birds, the normal blinkies shows clipping in the luminance channel. It will not show clipping in the red channel unless you switch it to show blinkies in the red channel. On a Nikon camera that is done in the display that shows the four histograms... luminance, red, blue, and green along with a small display of the image showing the blinkies. At the bottom of that display there is a listing RBG, selecting each one of those will switch the blinkies from the luminance channel to the Red, Blue, or Green channel. Most times with black and white or red on a bird the exposure would be adjusted to show a tiny bit of clipping to hopefully not block the darkest blacks. Hope this helps, thank you for sharing.

Joe Przybyla

"Sometimes I do get to places just as God is ready to have somebody click the shutter"... Ansel Adams

Lovely looking bird and well presented. Love the blacks/reds with nice detail on both. Nice pose and HA. The BG shows the bird well. A thinner perch would make a difference, and I think a faster SS would also have made a difference.

A great pose from this striking bird. I can vouch for the brilliance of the reds on this species. My attempts totally blew the red channel, even in the shade. I don't see any ill effects from motion blur. Greater DOF might have helped with the perch, but it's obvious you were fighting the low light. Pose, detail and exposure on the bird look great to me.

I think you did about as good as you could have asked for. The only birds that are black and red that I shoot are RWBBs. They definitely are a bit tricky to expose for me as I tend to like to overexpose black birds a bit to get more detail out of them. It's a fine line and I usually overexpose the reds a bit and then tame them down in PP.
Great looking bird to shoot and I like the pose, perch and BG. Well done